


Unfallen

by silverlake7169



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post Reichenbach, Pre-Slash, Sherlock Holmes Returns after Reichenbach, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-13
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-08 08:43:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/759404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverlake7169/pseuds/silverlake7169
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the fall, John does not move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Loneliness and the Scream

**Author's Note:**

> So, each part of this fic is named after a Frightened Rabbit song. Mostly because I was listening to a whole lot of Frightened Rabbit when ‘Reichenbach’ aired, and also while writing this, and their music pretty much became indistinguishable from John’s mental state in my mind. So for an extra-immersive experience, download the relevant song and listen along as you read!

**1\. the loneliness and the scream**

Getting out of bed has never been a problem.

Even in the months after he’d first got back to London, back at the bedsit when he’d wake up shuddering and soaked if he’d slept at all, he’d never hesitate to get up. He’d had nothing to get up for, but it hadn’t mattered.

But now.

He’s been staring at the same spot on his wall for the past 37 minutes, ever since he woke up at seven as he always has.

There’s always that too-brief window between sleep and waking when his mind is empty, a blank canvas. If he tries hard in these few seconds, he can hear the sound of pacing footsteps down the hall.

The truth settles over him like a muzzle, and he struggles and lashes out uselessly against it and then there’s a moment where he can’t breathe for aching.

He’d stopped counting the hours. It isn’t healthy. He knows this.

Two months and nine days since Sherlock died.

*-*

“Why do you think it’s important for you to measure the passage of time?” Tanya asks.

He doesn’t respond. She’s used to it.

He wonders what she thinks about, during the endless blanks that make up their so-called sessions. Family? Dinner? Other patients? He sincerely hopes she’s not spending all that time trying to figure him out.

He sits perfectly still across from her and thinks about falling.

*-*

It’s 8.24 by the time he finally makes it into the kitchen.

He’d always known that coming back to the flat was a bad idea.

What he’d told Mrs Hudson at the grave had been true, and yet after five weeks he’d found himself back here, because what else is there?

Sherlock’s lab equipment, his books, his clothing, lies in boxes neatly stacked against the living room’s west wall. Mrs Hudson hasn’t raised the question of what to do with them again, and for this he’s grateful.

He makes tea and toast out of habit, doesn’t notice until halfway through the slice that it’s bone dry and desperately in need of butter, spread, something. It’s all become pretty much the same.

He’s always dismissed it as hyperbole when patients had described food as tasting like ash. Temporary loss of taste can be attributed to depression, shock, anxiety, psychosis, but there is no medical reason for all food to literally taste ashen. And yet.

Everything in the world makes him sick. This world that believes Sherlock Holmes was a fraud and he’s the deluded sidekick who just can’t face the truth.

_You should be fighting for him._

The thought plagues him, a tiny pinprick of nauseous guilt. He should be contacting the press, gathering evidence, building a case against Moriarty, because Sherlock deserves so much better than to be remembered like this.

_Death of a conman: Tragic fraudster plummets to his grave – Full story page 9_

But he doesn’t know where to begin and his head’s fuzzy and he can’t bear to hear what the world thinks, let alone try to fight it.

_Holmes, 31, was understood to habitually abuse Class A drugs, a source told the Daily Mail._

And when it comes down to it, he has no explanation for what happened.

_In the hours leading up to his death, Holmes resisted arrest and threatened police officers with a firearm before fleeing._

Lestrade had tried to speak to him at the funeral. A cold weight like a fist had settled around John’s chest and he’d dug his nails hard into his palms, barely hearing the words.

“Never come near me again,” he’d managed to get out, and Lestrade had looked stricken. John couldn’t have given less of a fuck.

“And if I ever see you at his grave…”

The sentence doesn’t need to be finished. If he’s honest, he doesn’t know how he would have finished it.

*-*

“You’re very focused on the facts,” Tanya comments at their next session.

“Sorry?”

“Everything you’ve said about that day, about what happened, about the events leading up to it. I feel as though I’ve got a good grasp of the facts.”

“Right.”

“But there’s one fact you don’t ever mention,” she presses.

“Oh?”

His fists are clenching again, nails finding their deep familiar grooves.

“When you describe him, you use the word ‘fell’. You don’t ever use the word ‘jumped’.”

He hates crying in here. It feels contrived, like he’s performing or maybe auditioning.

Not to mention it’s completely impractical since he pays by the hour.

He knows from experience that once he starts crying for Sherlock, he can’t stop.

*-*

There’s a metallic taste in his mouth – side effect from the pills he shouldn’t be taking any more, inappropriate for long-term use, habit forming. But he can’t go back to before, when he’d feel sleep begin to take hold and jerk violently awake with a sob as Sherlock’s marble face rushed to him, head half caved in and bloodied, blank slate eyes staring.

Some nights even with the pills he doesn’t sleep. He stays awake in a half-drugged haze and thinks of Moriarty, who he doesn’t allow himself to think of in the day because he’s truly afraid he will harm someone.

“Richard Brook’s” body had been found, on the rooftop, and an initial forensics report had come out indicating suicide as the cause of death. The coroner’s report was pending. That hadn’t stopped the tabloids painting Sherlock as the killer, and Brook as the sacrificial lamb in his sad, sick game of pretending.

He half-dreams of strangling Moriarty, of wrapping his hands around his neck and crushing his windpipe, snapping his neck, pushing thumbs into his eyeballs until they rupture.

 _What did you do to him? What the fuck did you do to him_ he’ll ask, and Moriarty will grin inanely back at him even with his eyes gouged and his neck broken and there will still be no answers.

Two months and twenty-eight days since Sherlock killed himself.

*-*

“Okay, here’s a hypothetical one for you.”

She raises her eyebrows expectantly.

“A person – somebody self-assured, competent, confident, supremely bloody confident in fact – suddenly offs themselves. No warning. No reason. No note.”

“Okay,” she says, looking at him with sorrow he resents.

“What would you say? As a psychiatric professional, about that person? Because there’s no logic to it, is there, somebody who was just…so…okay.”

 _He wouldn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t._ His mind screams suddenly, again, with the lunacy of it all.

“Hypothetically,” she says, gently, “I’d say that that person probably wasn’t as okay as they seemed to be.”

John swallows, pressing fingertips hard against his forehead.

“Some nights I wake up, suddenly, and I know – I just, I know, completely, that he isn’t dead. I’m more sure of it than I am of this room around me now. Because he wouldn’t—” he breaks off just before his voice cracks.

Tanya waits.

“He wouldn’t kill himself.”

She waits.

“He was okay. He was better than okay, he was…”

Brilliant. Beautiful. Fucking _perfect_.

He doesn’t speak for the rest of the session.

*-*

At 3.34 am, he wakes up screaming.

*~*

When it’s finally, finally light outside, he takes his keys and gets out of the flat.

He walks up to Marylebone Road, past an unusually deserted Madame Tussaud’s (too early for even the keenest of tourists) and along into Regent’s Park.

Green space soothes him, to an extent. It’s streets he can’t face nowadays, sheer vertical walls and flat roofs and the blank-eyed stare of windows. He sees blood on every other paving stone.

He wishes now that he’d dressed for running – he needs to be in motion, fast motion, the kind of motion where all you’re thinking about is your next five strides – but instead he power-walks, head bowed.

If he hadn’t gone out for a walk last January, if the four walls of his bedsit hadn’t pressed so heavily that day, he’d never have run into Stamford. The odds of them running into each other in a city this size were pretty remote to begin with.

No Stamford, no Sherlock.

And this is what’s left.

Three months and seven days since Sherlock threw himself from the rooftop of St Bart’s and his spine, his brain, his heart shattered against the pavement and everything he ever was had been extinguished and John had stood by and watched and done. nothing.

He stops, abruptly, knees weak.

*-*

“You said before that you were angry.”

“I just…don’t. Understand.”

The heels of his hands are grinding hard into his closed eyelids, lurid worms dancing in the dark.

She’s talking again, but all he hears is Sherlock’s voice, choked with tears.

_I’m a fake. I researched you._

*-*

“Excuse me?”

A young woman is looking down at him.

“Are you okay? Do…do you need help?”

He’s looking at her trainers.

All the things Sherlock could have gleaned from these trainers. Her weight, her shoe size, how far she’s run, how often she runs or doesn’t and why, how long she’s had the trainers, does she overpronate or supinate, every injury she’s ever had, whether she’s single, whether she has pets, whether she gets on with her mother, how many hours she slept last night.

All he gets is Asics, pretty well-worn, she’s got a Nike clip-on pouch on her left shoe storing keys, maybe a few coins, so she’s probably a regular runner, bit specialist for a newbie.

“Are you okay?” she asks again.

“What do you think of Sherlock Holmes?’

He’s still looking at her feet.

“Sorry?”

“Sherlock Holmes. The detective. Threw himself off a roof. What, you don’t read the papers?”

He almost apologises for being rude. Pointless. 

“No, I know who you mean,” she replies. “Um… I didn’t really know what to think. It was a horrible story.”

His throat closes up. She’s shifting her weight from one foot to the other now, probably regretting the decision to be a good Samaritan and check on the lunatic.

“Um, look, are you sure you’re okay?”

“What do you _think_ about him?” John repeats, voice tight, and finally he looks up at her face. And maybe she recognises him (confirmed bachelor John Watson), or maybe she just feels sorry for him.

“I don’t think he was a fraud,” she says, gently. “My flatmate works with a guy who hired him – Sherlock Holmes, he helped to find this guy’s brother. He says he was the real deal.”

He’s now positive that she recognises him. She looks very, very sympathetic.

“Listen, do you want me to maybe… is there someone I can phone for you? Or there’s the boathouse café, should be open by now if you want a hot drink, or something?”

Shaking his head, he waves her away.

“It’s fine,” he says, then, almost absently, “it’s all fine.”

*~*

He walks back to the flat and closes the door behind him and walks straight to his bedroom and takes out his gun and sits with it just resting against his temple.

This, too, soothes him. The reassurance that death’s within his reach. Easy. His hand is perfectly steady.

Nerves of steel.

Later, he drinks Scotch until he can’t feel his limbs and sits foetal in the living room, wedged between two boxes of lab equipment.

He knows he won’t go on like this for much longer.

*~*

Psychosis. It was only a matter of time.

He’s hallucinated before – from dehydration, exhaustion, there’d been days in the desert where reality was best kept at a distance – but never like this.

He blinks, hard, staggering upright against the wall.

“John,” Sherlock says, and it’s his voice, his voice his voice rich and low and everything he’s ached to hear again just one more time.

His own heartbeat is deafening.

“I d–“

He starts the sentence but there’s no breath in his body. The edges of his vision are dark, the room shifting into gray. He falls.


	2. The Woodpile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The return.

**2\. the woodpile**

When he comes to, everything is strange.

There’s a throbbing at the back of his skull, his mouth so dry he can’t swallow. The air has shifted, somehow. 

“Drink this,” Sherlock says.

Sherlock.

“Sherlock,” John rasps out. Takes the glass and holds it, dumbly. 

“Drink it. You’ve consumed at least 27 units of alcohol, you’re dehydrated, and you’re in shock.”

His mind is empty. There’s a yawning gap where thoughts and speech should be. He drinks, silently, and for the first time he really looks at Sherlock. 

Sherlock.

He looks identical. He’s strong, and alive, and his eyes are bright and his head is not caved in and he’s rocking on the balls of his feet, watching John with something like curiosity.

“Sherlock,” John says, again. 

“Yes.”

And John reaches out half-blind and finds a handful of coat, and holds on.

“John, there’s a lot I need to explain, so just listen. Moriarty was going to kill you, and Mrs Hudson, and Lestrade. He blackmailed me into committing suicide. There was a failsafe, but he shot himself before I could convince him to use it, and in any case I think our mutual death was the only outcome he would ever have accepted…”

Sherlock keeps talking, and John stares at his mouth moving, and something is rising within him.

He hasn’t heard a word. 

_Sherlock._

“ _What…the fuck is…happening?_ ” he explodes suddenly. He stands, shakes his head hard, half-expecting Sherlock’s face to fuzz and fade, as dreams do. 

Sherlock has stopped, mid-flow, and for the first time he looks uneasy. 

“John…”

“What…what is this?” He doesn’t know what question he’s asking. His hands are shaking and he still has a fistful of Sherlock’s coat.

“I didn’t die, John. Obviously. But the world had to believe that I did.”

Sherlock touches his arm, and it’s like he’s been winded. He recoils violently, sending Sherlock staggering back three paces.

“ _Don’t_. Jesus. Don’t.”

Because this is real, now, and there’s a nauseous weight settling in him.

This all feels suddenly familiar.

“Was,” he starts, and his voice cracks horribly. “Was this…this was all an experiment. Right?”

He can’t bear to look at Sherlock. Thinking of drugged fog and sugared coffee and the realization that he’d been played. Baskerville had been so easy to laugh off.

“What? John…”

“What were you trying to prove this time?” 

“Aren’t you listening? There was no hypothesis, John, this wasn’t about you.”

He has to laugh, then.

“Oh, God, no. Sorry, Course it wasn’t about me.” He presses a hand against his mouth, laughter coming in hysterical stops and starts.

He’s never seen Sherlock so genuinely wrong-footed.

“John, listen. This was the only way to keep all of you safe. But one of Moriarty’s network, a man called Moran, he knows I’m alive. It’s not safe here any more, we need to leave – I’ve already sent Mrs Hudson away and Mycroft is with Lestrade now…”

He trails off as John turns and walks away, into the hall, looking down at the floorboards for something solid, something that makes sense.

The past three months and seven days hover in his mind, useless now. 

“Why?” he asks, so quietly he’s not sure anyone will hear him. Still not sure any of this is happening.

“I wish there’d been another way. You have no idea what it cost me, to leave as I did.”

Sherlock’s voice is unexpectedly loud; he’s followed John, stands just behind him.

“What it cost—Right.”

The number of nights he’d sobbed and retched and pleaded out loud to have _just one more day with him_.

“But I knew you’d keep believing in me,” Sherlock says off-handedly, not grateful, not moved, not anything.

And that’s when heat and red take over.

He feels bone crunch under his knuckle, Sherlock shouting in pain, and finally he’s in motion, blood pounding like it hasn’t in months.

They’re on the floor then and Sherlock is beneath him cradling a bloodied nose. He grabs hold of John’s fist as it swings again and they grapple there for a long, long moment before he connects with Sherlock’s eye socket. 

Red is streaming now, and he’s stopped fighting abruptly and something aches in John. He never wanted to see blood on that face again. _Oh God Sherlock._

He rolls to one side, away.

“Get out,” he whispers harshly, not looking back. “Get out, now.”

“I’m not going to–“

“ _I will really hurt you_ ,” John snarls, and the words sound ridiculous, posturing. He sinks into himself, curling foetal and trying to breathe deeply.

Silence. 

For a long time, there’s silence. He hears Sherlock stand, his footsteps retreating. He feels light-headed in the darkness, eyelids still squeezed shut, and he focuses on nothing but floating.

*~*

“I didn’t know.”

Sherlock’s voice brings him back. He blinks, several times, letting the light settle as he gingerly sits up.

“What?”

“I didn’t know that you’d… That you’d be so affected.”

Sherlock is holding a wad of tissue against his nose, looking oddly lost. Some time has passed; minutes, John guesses. 

“I certainly didn’t imagine you becoming quite so intimately acquainted with your own firearm.”

“You’ve had people watching me.”

“Naturally. I watched you myself, at first, until it became impractical. For the first month, on and off.”

__

Oh.

So.

The graveyard. 

After everything, this is less of a surprise than he’d have expected. 

“Get off on watching people weep over your grave?” he bites out. “Even by your standards, that’s morbid.”

“You’re hardly in a position to talk.”

“I’d have done it, you know,” John says, aiming every word like a bullet, because it’s suddenly clear that Sherlock is genuinely disconcerted. “Today wasn’t the first time I came close.”

Sherlock blinks, and he feels a savage grin break onto his face.

“Oh, yeah. You’re not quite as omnipotent as you thought, right? What if I’d done it?” 

“John.”

“Go on, think about it. It’d actually be…yeah. You know what it’d be, it’d be fucking poetic. You know, you make your grand entrance, billowing coat, all that, only to find me in a bloody pile with my head blown to pieces. That’s textbook poetic justice, right?”

“Stop it,” Sherlock says quietly, his voice lowering as John’s raises. 

“What would you have done then?”

“John…”

_“What would you have done?”_

“I don’t know,” Sherlock snaps, actually whispering now. “I don’t know.” 

John nods, pursing his lips together until they’re numb. 

Squaring his shoulders, he gets to his feet and stumbles into the hallway, down the stairs, out onto the street.

He can’t feel his legs moving beneath him, the cars around him look strange and brick walls loom and he has no idea where he’s going other than away.

Away.

But of course, Sherlock is chasing him. 

“John. John, it’s not safe out here. Come back inside. Now.”

He keeps walking, just one foot in front of the other, and Sherlock is as close as it’s possible to get without touching, clearly still wary. 

“ _John._ ”

“So you heard me in the graveyard, then?” John murmurs, conversationally. “Telling me how great you were, how human you were, you just stood there and watched me fucking tear my guts out over you? Must have sounded hilarious.”

“Look–“

“All along, all for some game between you and him…”

He can’t catch his breath, and when Sherlock plants a hand against his chest and physically stops him he doesn’t push. 

“It wasn’t a game, John, for God’s sake will you listen to me?”

“Why?”

He wants to say more, wants to spit that he had been wrong about Sherlock, wrong to call him human, wrong to call him _the best man_. Wrong to believe in him at all.

When he finally brings himself to speak again, his voice has transformed into a small, brittle thing, and what comes out instead is “How could you?”

Sherlock steps closer, palm still pressed against John’s chest.

“John, please listen. Moriarty had snipers trained on you, Mrs Hudson and Lestrade, all of them instructed to pull the trigger if I didn’t jump. Even with Moriarty dead, the instruction stood. The slightest hint that I was alive, the slightest hint of any foul play, you would all have been gone. I couldn’t contemplate taking that risk. It had to be utterly airtight, utterly believable.”

“I saw you…I saw you jump. I _saw_ you.” 

“The cyclist who knocked you over, that wasn’t a coincidence.”

But John isn’t listening, still can’t comprehend facts or narrative or sequences of events. He’s back outside St Bart’s, numb, staggering unfeeling towards a bloodied, prone form and _god please no oh god no._

“I saw you on the ground,” he mumbles. “I checked your pulse and I saw your face and you were gone. You were gone. I was there. I was there, and there was nothing I could do.” 

He can’t stop trembling.

“I know,” Sherlock says gently. “I know, John. Please come inside.”

He has Sherlock’s hand in a vice grip, now, pressed against his heart, and lets himself be steered. 

Back inside, they stand motionless in the kitchen, both suddenly lacking a script. Sherlock’s nose is still bleeding.

“You should put some ice on that,” John says, eventually. 

Sherlock doesn’t respond but leans against the wall, looking tired. John goes to the freezer, empties a tray of ice cubes and scoops them into a Ziploc bag, wraps the whole thing in a dishtowel. 

So many times they’d been through this makeshift ritual, after a chase gone wrong or one insensitive comment to the wrong witness. Sherlock never showed any interest in tending to his own injuries, but always complied when John pushed.

“Is it broken?” he asks, joining Sherlock.

There’s no response; his mind is already elsewhere.

“Come here.”

Sherlock turns, and John presses the icepack gently against his swollen nose, still not quite looking at him.

He watches the barely perceptible rise and fall of Sherlock’s chest beneath his shirt, too tired now to feel anything but tearfully grateful. _One more miracle, Sherlock, for me._

After he has counted out exactly ten minutes, he lowers the ice pack and raises his eyes to assess the swelling, and he’s caught off guard by Sherlock gazing directly at him, their eyes really meeting for the first time. 

He feels winded.

A terrible sound, a wailing, strangled breath, and he’s bent double suddenly with sobbing, leaning hard against Sherlock, trying to speak but getting out only half-words. 

And Sherlock holds onto him very, very tightly and says nothing.

The ice pack has slipped from John’s hand, lies quietly melting between them. 

It takes several minutes before he can draw a breath again, inhaling shakily against Sherlock’s neck, and he still doesn’t trust himself to speak, doesn’t trust this moment not to disappear. 

Then the hand cradling his head goes suddenly rigid.

He tries to look up, but Sherlock holds him in place, breath warm against his ear.

“John. Someone is here to kill us. He’s in the hallway downstairs. Take this, and do exactly as I say.”

Cold metal is pressed into his hand.

“In seven seconds’ time, shoot the window pane. We’re going to jump. There’s a car waiting for us on Glentworth Street.”

John nods. Counts out five beats, listening to Sherlock’s pulse.

“Now.”

He fires, grips Sherlock’s wrist as glass shatters, and they run.


	3. The Wrestle

He hadn’t looked down.

This is the thing that he cannot comprehend.

Sherlock had pulled him towards the window frame and said _go_ with urgency and John had not even stopped to look down. Basic escape procedure. Know your environment. Know your landing. 

The drop is roughly thirteen feet, he knows, and he bends his knees just in time to land without injury, pain shooting up his shins as he rolls forward to absorb the shock. 

Insane, he thinks to himself as Sherlock lands beside him. Sherlock said jump, and he hadn’t hesitated. 

“Come on,” Sherlock barks and they run flat out down Melcombe Street, a shot ringing out behind them just as they veer right and dive for the waiting car. John flinches reflexively at a second gunshot, hand tight on his own gun and he turns, back against the car, scanning the street behind them. 

“Get in,” he tells Sherlock, gun now aimed defensively towards the deserted corner, and only once he hears the door open does he follow.

Mycroft is waiting for them, his unruffled demeanour at odds with the sudden revving of the engine as the car surges forward, the driver plainly releasing a long-held trigger finger of his own. 

“All right?” Sherlock murmurs. 

John nods, forcing his fingers to uncurl from his gun. 

They’re whipping down residential streets at a speed that seems impossible, heading in the direction of St John’s Wood. He hears Sherlock take a breath beside him and he closes his eyes for a moment, head pounding and muscles close to spasm.

When he opens his eyes, Mycroft is surveying them both with eyebrows raised, taking in Sherlock’s bloodied nose and lip.

“Am I to intuit, then, that the reunion didn’t go entirely as smoothly as you had predicted?” he asks mildly, now eyeing John. He can only imagine what his own face looks like.

Sherlock only glares in response.

“Wait,” John starts, turning. “You predicted it would go smoothly? Really?”

With no response from Sherlock, he turns back to Mycroft who shrugs. 

“He seemed confident that you would understand the–”

“Shut up, Mycroft,” Sherlock bites out. 

“Really, so you thought… What, you thought you could just walk back in there after _three fucking months_ and I’d be fine with it. I’d just fall in line.”

He needs to be furious, needs to find rage again but he is too exhausted even to summon it, bone-tired and wrung out beyond his own understanding. He can’t bring himself to look at Sherlock any more, and rests his head in his hands for the rest of the journey.

After roughly half an hour, he looks up as the car grinds through gravel and comes to a halt.

“Where are we?” he asks as they get out, not much caring what the answer is.

“Barnet Gate,” Mycroft replies, shutting the car door sharply behind him. “Just outside Borehamwood. A safe house, you understand.”

John looks up at the house – a vaguely imposing Victorian pile, exactly the kind of house he’d expect Mycroft to own for weekends. 

“Not yours, I take it?” 

“Credit me with more caution than that, John,” Mycroft says pleasantly. “This location has no association with either my family or yours. It’s a government-designated safe house, which means you must keep its location absolutely confidential. You must not inform anyone of your whereabouts. Not family, not friends, not colleagues.”

“Noted.”

“And I’ll need your phone. There’s signal-blocking technology employed to make this location close to impossible to trace, but we can’t take the risk.”

John hands over his phone without comment. He should ask how long they’re going to be here, who exactly is on their trail, what precautions has Mycroft taken besides the location, but it’s beyond him at this point. 

Inside, the house is less daunting, furnished with a weird hodgepodge of mismatched antiques and IKEA space-fillers. It feels like an impression of a family home put together by someone who has never set foot in one, designed to look normal rather than to feel it. 

“I don’t have any stuff with me,” he realises out loud. All he has on him are his wallet and his gun. 

“That’s all taken care of,” Anthea says brightly, appearing beside him with a tight smile. “In your room you’ll find clothes in your size, toiletries, a new phone that’s safe to use and a few other essentials. If there’s anything else you need, just text. My number’s programmed in.”

He nods. 

“And which is my room?”

“Upstairs, second on the right.”

“Okay. If nobody objects, I’m going to go there.”

He looks to Mycroft, who nods.

“You look as though an early night would do you a world of good. There’ll be plenty of time tomorrow morning to debrief you.”

“Right, great. Thanks.”

He forces his eyes to slide impassively past Sherlock as he heads towards the stairs, feeling his gaze with every step. 

Upstairs, he finds an immaculately made double bed with more pillows than he knows what to do with, and it’s all he can do not to pass straight out fully clothed. But he forces himself to change into the crisp pyjamas laid out on his pillow ( _weird_ ) and use the overzealous electric toothbrush provided in the en suite bathroom before finally crawling under the covers.

And he drifts off, purple bruises dancing behind his eyelids. 

*~*

He can’t catch his breath.

There are people crowded around him, moving in from all sides and there is blood and shattered bone under his hands. He can’t see clear forms, the world around him blurred, but he knows that when he looks down he will see perfectly.

Sherlock rattles out a breath, caved-in ribcage spasming and this cannot happen, this does not happen, god he’s still alive. His skull half-vanished against the pavement. 

John tries to speak but nothing comes out, and Sherlock is staring up at him with eyes wide in agony and he’s suffocating, slowly, his lungs filling up with blood and his crushed body refusing to spare him these final moments of torture.

And John puts a hand over his mouth and smothers the life from him, willing the pain to be over _god please let him rest_ , and Sherlock will not still under his hand but thrashes and shudders like a dying animal in a trap.

“Oh Jesus, no,” he’s on the ground, no, on the floor, and the daylight is gone. His face pressed against light carpet, not dark curls. 

His stomach rolls dangerously and he swallows, hard, feeling beads of sweat roll down his spine. Focusing on the carpet under his hands and the silence in the room. 

“Okay,” he whispers to himself, a desperate attempt at steadying. “Okay.”

Before he can fully catch his breath he’s upright and stumbling half-blind towards the door, but this is not Baker Street, this is carpet and not wood beneath his feet. 

He pauses in the corridor, foreign doors looming in the darkness, and his eyes sting with something like fear.

Wait.

And the world comes back to him. Safe house. Mycroft. Somewhere near Borehamwood.

His own room is the second on the right. 

He turns to the left and pushes the door open, feeling weightless and surreal as though he’s gliding, and finds what he needs almost immediately. 

Sherlock is asleep with his back turned to the door, curled half-foetal, and this is not enough. He moves gingerly around the bed, more conscious now of his footfalls, and drops to his knees when he can finally see Sherlock’s face, placid, the bruises around his nose and jaw purpling. 

He has seen Sherlock sleep before, but always in feverish snatches or under the influence of something. This is different. This is rest. 

He sits on his heels and watches the barely perceptible rise and fall of Sherlock’s chest, letting the tension drain from his muscles like liquid. The dream falling away like old skin as his heartbeat gradually slows and quietens.

For several minutes, maybe more, he can’t conceive of ever moving from this place. The stray thought occurs that this might be the closest he has ever come to meditating, his thoughts easing out from knots into free-flowing curves as he watches Sherlock sleep, mirrors his breathing.

The digital clock on the bedside table is spelling out 4:07. He must have gone to bed not long after 8pm, he reasons, which makes this as good a time as any to get up. 

After another long, still beat, he tears himself away. 

Back in his own room, he showers and shaves and surveys the array of clothing that’s been laid out for him. Jeans, shirts, jumpers, shoes all identical to ones he owns but with the tags still on. There are even tracksuit bottoms and running shoes (Anthea has really thought of everything) and it’s these that he puts on, remembering the sight of trees and woodland as they arrived last night. Fresh air and forward motion feel essential. 

Downstairs, he finds a light already on and follows the source to a sprawling open-plan kitchen. Mycroft is sitting at the head of an oak dining table, the day’s papers laid out in an unopened mosaic before him. 

“Morning, John,” he says, without looking up. “Coffee?”

“Er, yeah, okay.”

He sits as Mycroft stands.

“How do you take it?

“Black’s fine. Thanks. So… early riser, or late night?”

“Six of one…” Mycroft smiles, returning and handing John a steaming mug. “I seldom sleep more than four hours a night. It began as a choice, and became habit.”

“Like Thatcher.”

Mycroft winces.

“If you must. I prefer Thomas Edison as a point of comparison.” 

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

He sips his coffee (impeccable, of course) in silence, watching the first faint hue of dawn on the horizon. 

“Can I ask how you’re faring after yesterday’s revelations?”

“I’ve been better,” John says tightly. “Then again I’ve been worse. I’ve been worse for three months, so. I don’t know.”

“I apologise for the surveillance measures. After Sherlock made me aware of his survival, he requested that I keep periodic watch over you. Worried, I think, that Moriarty’s men would follow through regardless.”

“Or that I’d eat my own gun,” John says, as pleasantly as he can manage. “So… at what stage did you know?”

“Three weeks after his death. Sherlock contacted me because he was no longer able to stay in London, though he wouldn’t say why. At the time, I was rather too blind-sided to ask. And ashamed, of course.”

Ah.

“So he knew, then? That you sold him out to Moriarty?”

“Of course he knew,” Mycroft murmurs. 

“So. Moriarty was going to have me, Mrs Hudson and Lestrade killed unless Sherlock committed suicide. Because that was the only way to completely destroy Sherlock’s reputation, right?”

Mycroft nods.

“Mrs Hudson and Lestrade have been moved to their own safe house, miles from here. Sherlock has spent the last two months systematically shutting down Moriarty’s network, a task that was already underway once the news of his death became public. It’s infinitely more difficult to command undying loyalty from beyond the grave.”

John swallows a mouthful of coffee too hard, and as he chokes Mycroft looks over pointedly.

“Present company being the exception that proves the rule.”

_He was my best friend and I’ll always believe in him._

“Yeah, yeah,” John says savagely. “Lot of good it did me, too. He knew he could come waltzing back in whenever and I’d still be waiting there, like the fucking sap I apparently am.”

“The opposite is true, John. He expected you to move on. When I told him how poorly you were coping, that I felt you were a danger to yourself, he was… nonplussed. I don’t believe he ever imagined that his death would affect you so profoundly.”

John scoffs.

“Come on. It’s Sherlock. You’re not telling me he hadn’t already plotted out the whole bloody trajectory of my reaction in his head before he jumped.”

“My brother isn’t accustomed to devotion. Sherlock had very few friends at school, fewer still at university. Those that he had regarded him as an oddity, a sort of conversation piece, intriguing to have around but very much object, rather than subject. Easy to disregard.”

John nods.

“I do know all this.”

“But I’m not sure that you understand the implications. He has no frame of reference for your kind of… loyalty.”

Mycroft pauses for a long beat before this last word, selecting it with ostentatious care. 

John has no comeback. Instead he lets the silence settle around them, sipping his coffee as the echo of Sherlock’s words comes back to him. _I didn’t know that you’d be so affected_.

“If I go outside to run, am I going to get snipered?” he asks, finally.

“Not if you stay within a one-mile radius. Don’t go beyond the forest limits, don’t cross any roads. If you see livestock, you’ve gone too far.”

“Right.”

He leaves Mycroft with his collage of front pages, and stepping out into the crisp dawn air he feels driven for the first time in months.


End file.
